(1) Field of the Invention
The invention pertains generally to bandwidth management. More specifically, the invention relates to allocating available bandwidth shared by a plurality of users.
(2) Description of the Related Art
Travellers increasingly view in-room high speed Internet access (HSIA) as a requirement when choosing at which hotel to stay. Business travellers may need to access company networks while on the road and tourists may wish to upload photos and send email to family friends while travelling. To provide in-room HSIA, hotels typically purchase a connection to the Internet from a local Internet service provider (ISP). The ISP provides the hotel with a fixed amount of bandwidth determined according to the ISP's pricing structure or other constraints. The hotel shares the available bandwidth between the hotel guests, users in meeting and conference rooms, and the hotel's networked computer systems.
A large hotel may have hundreds or even thousands of guests staying in guest rooms and utilizing meeting rooms—each competing for Internet bandwidth. One or more computer systems in the hotel may additionally need to transfer data via the Internet such as to receive reservations from external travel agencies or to download content for playback by guests using the hotel's in-room media and entertainment system. Because user satisfaction will be lowered if access to the Internet is slow, unresponsive, or unreliable, the available Internet bandwidth provided by the ISP needs to be effectively allocated between the various users within the hotel.
Typically, when a user connects a network device to the hotel's LAN, the user is required by the hotel's HSIA system to authenticate and gain access to the network, for example, by providing a password or other information such as room number and registered guest's name. Once authorized, traffic shaping is performed on a per-user basis in order to cap each user's maximum usage at a certain level while still sharing the total available bandwidth between all guests and other applications within the hotel. For example, a basic user bandwidth cap may limit each user to at most receive 256 kbit/sec of the hotel's available bandwidth to the Internet. The actual amount received by the user may be less than the cap during peak usage times.
Some hotels allow users to purchase “upgraded” bandwidth, which typically involves raising the user's individual bandwidth cap while still sharing the available bandwidth with other users. For example, the user's cap may be raised to 1024 kbit/sec after a payment of $9.99 is received. Again, when bandwidth is upgraded in this way, the maximum throughput is limited to the cap but the minimum throughput is not limited and instead depends on how much bandwidth other users are currently using.
A hotel may also allow a user to purchase an amount of guaranteed bandwidth that is not shared with other users. Guaranteed bandwidth is often also provided by the hotel to meeting and conference rooms, and the users of these rooms share the room's allocation. The amount of guaranteed bandwidth allocated to hotel guests is generally set according to an amount purchased by the user during a sign-in process, and the amount of guaranteed bandwidth allocated to conference and meeting rooms is typically determined when the room is booked and may be a function of the booking price to allow the conference organizer to pay according to the level of bandwidth required for the conference.
When bandwidth is guaranteed, ideally the minimum bandwidth that a user (or room, etc) benefiting from the guarantee will ever experience will be the guaranteed rate. In some cases, the bandwidth may also be capped at a higher rate so when there is bandwidth in the hotel available over and above the guaranteed rate, the user may experience even higher rates. When the hotel is provided with a fixed total ISP bandwidth, care must be taken by the hotel to not oversell guaranteed bandwidth or it may be impossible for the hotel to actually deliver the guaranteed rates when usage is high.
Traffic shaping and prioritization may also be performed by monitoring and detecting traffic types and giving preferential treatment for certain time-sensitive applications such as teleconferencing voice and video traffic. Compression, caching, and blocking technologies (i.e., blocking malware and other unwanted web traffic) may also be utilized by the hotel's HSIA system to reduce unnecessary bandwidth utilization and thereby increase the bandwidth available to share between users.
Although the above-described methods of managing bandwidth within a hotel are useful, they also tend to be unfair to certain users. For example, in some circumstances a user who has not upgraded to an amount of guaranteed bandwidth may be starved for bandwidth when sharing a small amount of available bandwidth with other users. Due to a variety of reasons it may not be possible for this user to purchase guaranteed bandwidth, for example, because the total ISP connection bandwidth is limited and other users (i.e., meeting rooms and/or VIP guests) may already have reserved the hotel's limit on guaranteed bandwidth. Although, the user may be able to upgrade to a higher individual bandwidth cap, during peak usage times when bandwidth is in high demand, the actual portion of bandwidth received by the user may not even reach the lower cap so having a higher cap will provide no benefit. Further techniques to optimize bandwidth allocation between multiple users to help prevent bandwidth starvation in these situations would be beneficial.